Welcome to another volume of the Gaming Bus Live Chat. Last week, I played Ninja Gaiden 1. It was… enlightening, if only to show how much rust I’ve had with the game over the years.

This week, we’re doing to do something different. On the recommendation of my former colleague and our frequent commenter The Samuraiter, we are going to go over a game I haven’t played before: Yo! Noid, for the NES. For those unaware, the Noid was an advertising campaign in the late 80s for Dominoes Pizza, before their marketing campaigns became “hey, our pizza isn’t quite as bad as you think it is!”. He was a character who tried to ruin Dominoes Pizza, but was thwarted every time, basically making him the pizza equivalent to the Trix rabbit. The campaign slogan, “Avoid The Noid!”, became a minor part of 80s culture. How Capcom managed to turn that into a game – especially one that was originally a ninja game in Japan, named Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru – is beyond me, but this is a period of time in which this was what cool people looked like.

Our first two Live Chats were notable in that I had beaten each game. I beat Ninja Gaiden when I was a kid, and Suikoden V a few years back. This time, I’m going into a game completely fresh; I’ve never played Yo! Noid in my life before this, as part of my lasting “don’t play games based on the marketing campaigns of pizza chains from the 80s” rule.

About Christopher Bowen

Christopher Bowen is the Editor in Chief of Gaming Bus. Before opening Gaming Bus in May of 2011, he was the News Editor at Diehard GameFAN, a lead reporter for DailyGamesNews, and a reviewer at Not A True Ending, also contributing to VIMM, SNESZone and Scotsmanality. Outside of the industry, he is a network engineer in Norwalk, CT and a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

http://mercuryice.com Crystal Steltenpohl

Man with that kind of reaction I kind of wonder how you would handle Superman for the Atari 2600. With the volume on.

Samuraiter

I’d apologize for putting you through that, but the results were about as amusing as I’d hoped they’d be. And you ended up getting farther than me, but you had to use savestates and Game FAQs. You and I BOTH had to use profanity to get as far as we did, though.